On most highways, there are signs every few miles with a few very wise words:
"Keep right except to pass"
If you are dealing with tailgaters in the right lane, you're fine. If you're doing this in the passing lane, you are just being an ass, and can actually get a ticket for this.
I've heard the excuse, but the left lane is the fast lane, and I was doing the speed limit. There is no fast lane...it's a passing lane.
I think the reason so many try to mimic unix is because it is already the industry standard. Linux handles things differently, but the end result is fairly transparent to the end user. So one can switch from a Unix system to a Linux system (or vice versa) and have a good grasp of how things work.
With Linux being open source, and the BSD variants available as well, I don't see much of a need to reinvent the wheel. Not to flame Microsoft (though I definately never mind doing that), but they are living proof of what happens when a company tries to reinvent the wheel. You end up with an operating system that's insecure and prone to errors and crashes.
One has to wonder how much more stable and secure Windows would be if they had instead focused on a proprietary desktop software for Unix, bringing the speed and stability of Unix to the home users' desktop.
DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be. But a surprising portion of what passes for modern technology can be traced back to this site, the home of Bell Laboratories, now the research arm of Lucent, but previously that of AT&T, a big American telecoms firm. It was at the Labs, as they are known colloquially, that the transistor was invented in 1947, making possible solid-state computing and paving the way for the microchip.
But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software--computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written--originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known (logically enough) as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. Dr Ritchie is the last of this group to remain at the Labs--at 62 he retains an aura of youthful enthusiasm. While others have departed for academia or newer companies, he is now the head of systems software research at Bell Labs, and is continuing his research into operating systems and languages.
Dr Ritchie likes to emphasise that he was just one member of a group. With characteristic modesty, he suggests that many of the improvements he introduced when developing C simply "looked like a good thing to do". Anyone else in the same place at the same time, he implies, would have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees. "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn," he says.
All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. As Dr Kernighan says, "it was a remarkable collection of really outstanding people who were pretty well paid to do whatever they wanted, and most of them had really good taste about what to work on." Dr McIlroy later wrote that "so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." Unix was not even given a name for more than a year after it was first invented. So much of what they did was done, initially, for themselves alone, sometimes for sheer amusement, and yet it has had a lasting legacy in the world outside. How did this happen, and what lessons follow for today's programmers?
There we were, all in one place
To answer this question, it is necessary, though difficult, to recall just how comparatively primitive the state of computing was 30 years ago. The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. By contrast, a desktop computer today typically costs a hundred times less, has roughly 64,000 times as much memory and a hard disk 40,000 times as big.
That any software, albeit with many revisions and modifications, could have survived such changes and still be a core technology today is nothing short o
I miss the old-time mentality of things. People like this developed things because it made sense. They didn't file for 20+ patents a day. They didn't litigate against companies working on a project with similar goals.
It's too bad companies (like SCO) can't spend their time developing something useful instead of sueing the companies that are truly doing something good for the IT community.
The new first 2 movies follow the general flow of the original first two?
Episode 1 & 4:
They are being chased/hunted, making several escapes, narrowly escaping defeat. Each movie ends with a very clear ending and a large ceremony celebrating the victory.
Episode 2 & 5:
This episode tells a story with family ties. In the 5th episode, we find out that Vader is really Anakin. In the 2nd episode, we see anakin falling in love with Padme. Both episodes end in a continuation type ending, leaving more questions than answers, with no real closure.
Episode 3 & 6? Will 3 follow the layout of episode 6?
Does it seem like Lucas is using the cookie cutter approach?
how much more continuity Lucas is going to flush down the toilet with this film.
He gives the book writers creative license but makes them follow a pre-determined origin and fate with the characters, and then totally pisses on them with the movies.
Boba Fett is a prime example. In the books, he was Jaster Mareel before he was Boba Fett. His ship was custom made, not a stolen prison ship. The ship part was taken from the Bounty Hunter video game. It was a good game, but still didn't do a good job of repairing the Bobba/Jango/Jaster thing.
LOL....I guess this post proves I have no life.
Switchblades aka automatic knives aren't illegal to own in most states. The law varies from state to state, and in Oregon, they are legal to buy and carry as long as they aren't concealed.
The way most states work is that you cannot buy a switchblade, nor carry one unless you are a member of active law enforcement, military, or only have one hand/arm. But owning one as part of a collection is legal in most states.
You are correct though, it's stupid to ban carrying switchblades. I live in Indiana. I can legally carry a concealed handgun capable of killing 11 people, but I can't carry a knife that opens when I push a button?
that even if there are alien civilizations within transmission range, that:
1. They will use radio to transmit communications. What if they use a method of signal transmission totally foreign to our understanding of physics?
2. That THEY are listening. Just because we are preoccupied with finding extra-terrestrial life, that doesn't mean that THEY are.
3. That they would even respond. The assumption is that they are able to respond. It's very likely that even if we find intelligent life, it will be behind us or ahead of us in terms of technological development. If they are behind us, they may not be able to respond. If they are ahead of us, they may not feel we are worthy of a response. How much attention do we show to ants? Who says that ant crawling on your leg isn't trying to make contact.
The article mentions 10 years until it may be commercially feasible. But this probably means insanely expensive for all but huge corporations and government. How long are we looking at until something like this comes into daily lives like the PC?
While it doesn't help with testing sites with a Mac, you can use a live Linux cd such as Knoppix for konqueror and firefox testing. Firefox has a windows port though...so I guess the only benefit is for testing with Konqueror.
This does cause harm. With most providers, you are limited to $x number of messages per month. If you use this number of messages on your own, anything you receive in spam costs you money!
Most cell phone providers have limits on the number of text messages a person can send and receive. If your cap is 50 for the month, and you get 4/day, you're 70 messages over your limit. If they charged as 20 cents a message (which some do) that's an extra $14/month.
This doesn't seem like much, but that works out to an extra $168/year (that's enough to buy a new phone every year) per person. Now imagine how many people are getting these messages out of the 4.7 million messages that were sent!
Carriers really need to do this. E-mail costs the ISPs money. This costs the customers money, and if they are too inconvenienced, they will switch providers.
I disagree. The programs will be written to run natively on Linux. As to system maintenance, it is set up to require bare bones maintenance, and I have already informed them that I would continue to do so on a contract basis at very attractive pricing if/when I do leave.
As to better with WinXP and word/excel, before I took over the IT aspects of the company, the owner was litteraly getting raped in service calls on the company computers and the NT server.
The problem with Windows is that it makes administration so user intuitive, that users who have no business administering a computer are trying to add account policies, manage subdomains, set permissions, and a bunch of other things they have no business touching.
Taking myself out of the picture, it may cost more for a network technician to come in and administer Linux systems on a trip by trip basis. But when you factor in the fact that once a problem is fixed, it stays fixed, the total cost is far less than if they were all running XP.
You also have to keep the virus/worm factor in mind. What happens when the latest script kiddie creation gets spread around the system and the computers are inoperable for days at a time?
You're right about this. I work as an administrator at a small mortgage company. I've been slowly switching the computers over to Linux, but there are still a few computers running windows for necessary programs I wrote in my early programming days (VB), and these computers are still running windows 98. I haven't gotten around to rewriting the programs in Java or C++.
But not to get off the subject, when someone is having problem with their computer, they obviously complain about it. My boss hears this, and wonders why we're having so many problems. I, of course, have to listen to immediate ranting and raving of how this is probably connected to Linux, only to finally check the computer and find that the problem is a user installing spyware, adware, personal programs, deciding to "customize" their computer and breaking something, or just a general Windows inconsistency. The only problem we've had on our Linux systems in the last 12 months has been a user who couldn't figure out why her password wasn't showing up when she typed it. LOL
I agree. It's sad that children aren't being taught computers in school anymore. They are being taught Microsoft programs. I remember the good old days when computers were relatively new in school, and our courses weren't Microsoft centric. We learned actual computer usage, and to some degree, programming. Nowadays, if kids learn programming, they learn VB. If kids learn word processing, they don't learn on a variety of applications, they learn on MS Word. If they are learning spreadsheets, they learn Excel.
But it's a self perpetuating cycle. They are learning these programs because these are the programs everyone knows, and that everyone uses. What would happen if you went into a job interview and they asked if you know MS Word, and you said "No, I haven't used it in 6 years."? Even if you tried to explain you've been using Word Perfect, openoffice.org, Abiword, or any of the other word processing software, you're already at a disadvantage.
sound a lot like the Iraqi information minister's claims that there were no troops in Bagdad.....aired right before the video of troops toppling statues of Sadam.
SCO makes these loud ludicrous claims about their guaranteed success, while getting their motions struck down, and admiting in court documents that they are unable to win the motion for summary judgement without more discovery (fishing).
Better yet, make the thing totally configurable so you can block all of the spyware inherently loaded into Windows. Not only can you lock down all incoming ports, but lock down all outgiong ports. Of course....iptables already does this. Just one more way they need 3rd party hardware/software to catch up to what Linux is already doing.
I don't think they ever intended to win. If they do, they won't be upset. But think about how long these lawsuits could drag out.
We already know that Linux is becoming an increasing threat to Microsoft's Windows operating system. And we know that Microsoft has indirectly funneled cash into SCO for the purpose of litigation, so it makes sense that if SCO can keep the legalities of Linux uncertain until late 2005/early 2006, Linux will not be as much of a threat to Longhorn on either the desktop or the server.
Of course, this will all end with SCO going bankrupt. But this is also assuming that their principals didn't already make millions of dollars when the stock was over $20/share. Not to mention the inflated salaries the key personel are probably paying themselves during this whole fiasco. That's what SCO (Mcbride) gets out of it.
I work at a company where telemarketing is done. We take great care to make sure DNC numbers are removed from our lists. However, our "telemarketers" use a regular phone to avoid that dead air after the customer answers. People don't realize that someone could have dialed the wrong number, or what's more likely is that the person put their number on the list in February, not realizing that the list won't be updated again until April.
Slashdot Mirror
On most highways, there are signs every few miles with a few very wise words:
"Keep right except to pass"
If you are dealing with tailgaters in the right lane, you're fine. If you're doing this in the passing lane, you are just being an ass, and can actually get a ticket for this.
I've heard the excuse, but the left lane is the fast lane, and I was doing the speed limit. There is no fast lane...it's a passing lane.
I think the reason so many try to mimic unix is because it is already the industry standard. Linux handles things differently, but the end result is fairly transparent to the end user. So one can switch from a Unix system to a Linux system (or vice versa) and have a good grasp of how things work.
With Linux being open source, and the BSD variants available as well, I don't see much of a need to reinvent the wheel. Not to flame Microsoft (though I definately never mind doing that), but they are living proof of what happens when a company tries to reinvent the wheel. You end up with an operating system that's insecure and prone to errors and crashes.
One has to wonder how much more stable and secure Windows would be if they had instead focused on a proprietary desktop software for Unix, bringing the speed and stability of Unix to the home users' desktop.
LOL
Can you imagine SCO going into court and having IBM/Redhat/Autozone/Etc point out that their "holy IP" started as a joke?
DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be. But a surprising portion of what passes for modern technology can be traced back to this site, the home of Bell Laboratories, now the research arm of Lucent, but previously that of AT&T, a big American telecoms firm. It was at the Labs, as they are known colloquially, that the transistor was invented in 1947, making possible solid-state computing and paving the way for the microchip.
But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software--computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written--originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known (logically enough) as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. Dr Ritchie is the last of this group to remain at the Labs--at 62 he retains an aura of youthful enthusiasm. While others have departed for academia or newer companies, he is now the head of systems software research at Bell Labs, and is continuing his research into operating systems and languages.
Dr Ritchie likes to emphasise that he was just one member of a group. With characteristic modesty, he suggests that many of the improvements he introduced when developing C simply "looked like a good thing to do". Anyone else in the same place at the same time, he implies, would have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees. "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn," he says.
All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. As Dr Kernighan says, "it was a remarkable collection of really outstanding people who were pretty well paid to do whatever they wanted, and most of them had really good taste about what to work on." Dr McIlroy later wrote that "so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." Unix was not even given a name for more than a year after it was first invented. So much of what they did was done, initially, for themselves alone, sometimes for sheer amusement, and yet it has had a lasting legacy in the world outside. How did this happen, and what lessons follow for today's programmers?
There we were, all in one place
To answer this question, it is necessary, though difficult, to recall just how comparatively primitive the state of computing was 30 years ago. The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. By contrast, a desktop computer today typically costs a hundred times less, has roughly 64,000 times as much memory and a hard disk 40,000 times as big.
That any software, albeit with many revisions and modifications, could have survived such changes and still be a core technology today is nothing short o
I miss the old-time mentality of things. People like this developed things because it made sense. They didn't file for 20+ patents a day. They didn't litigate against companies working on a project with similar goals. It's too bad companies (like SCO) can't spend their time developing something useful instead of sueing the companies that are truly doing something good for the IT community.
The new first 2 movies follow the general flow of the original first two?
Episode 1 & 4:
They are being chased/hunted, making several escapes, narrowly escaping defeat. Each movie ends with a very clear ending and a large ceremony celebrating the victory.
Episode 2 & 5:
This episode tells a story with family ties. In the 5th episode, we find out that Vader is really Anakin. In the 2nd episode, we see anakin falling in love with Padme. Both episodes end in a continuation type ending, leaving more questions than answers, with no real closure.
Episode 3 & 6? Will 3 follow the layout of episode 6?
Does it seem like Lucas is using the cookie cutter approach?
if ($works_first_time)
{
$do_again = 1;
}
how much more continuity Lucas is going to flush down the toilet with this film. He gives the book writers creative license but makes them follow a pre-determined origin and fate with the characters, and then totally pisses on them with the movies. Boba Fett is a prime example. In the books, he was Jaster Mareel before he was Boba Fett. His ship was custom made, not a stolen prison ship. The ship part was taken from the Bounty Hunter video game. It was a good game, but still didn't do a good job of repairing the Bobba/Jango/Jaster thing. LOL....I guess this post proves I have no life.
I should note, that I am in posession of this license.
There are also two types of carrying permits. A range permit, and a personal protection permit.
The range permit allows the carrying of a handgun to or from the range during daylight hours.
The personal protection permit allows the carrying of a handgun during any hours anywhere guns are not illegal.
Switchblades aka automatic knives aren't illegal to own in most states. The law varies from state to state, and in Oregon, they are legal to buy and carry as long as they aren't concealed. The way most states work is that you cannot buy a switchblade, nor carry one unless you are a member of active law enforcement, military, or only have one hand/arm. But owning one as part of a collection is legal in most states. You are correct though, it's stupid to ban carrying switchblades. I live in Indiana. I can legally carry a concealed handgun capable of killing 11 people, but I can't carry a knife that opens when I push a button?
that even if there are alien civilizations within transmission range, that: 1. They will use radio to transmit communications. What if they use a method of signal transmission totally foreign to our understanding of physics? 2. That THEY are listening. Just because we are preoccupied with finding extra-terrestrial life, that doesn't mean that THEY are. 3. That they would even respond. The assumption is that they are able to respond. It's very likely that even if we find intelligent life, it will be behind us or ahead of us in terms of technological development. If they are behind us, they may not be able to respond. If they are ahead of us, they may not feel we are worthy of a response. How much attention do we show to ants? Who says that ant crawling on your leg isn't trying to make contact.
If this is the case, would this make shared computing almost certain at some future point? Or do I misunderstand the technology?
The article mentions 10 years until it may be commercially feasible. But this probably means insanely expensive for all but huge corporations and government. How long are we looking at until something like this comes into daily lives like the PC?
version of Linux for the tablet PC, but having no tablet PC, I cannot test it.
Here's the Link
While it doesn't help with testing sites with a Mac, you can use a live Linux cd such as Knoppix for konqueror and firefox testing. Firefox has a windows port though...so I guess the only benefit is for testing with Konqueror.
This does cause harm. With most providers, you are limited to $x number of messages per month. If you use this number of messages on your own, anything you receive in spam costs you money!
Most cell phone providers have limits on the number of text messages a person can send and receive. If your cap is 50 for the month, and you get 4/day, you're 70 messages over your limit. If they charged as 20 cents a message (which some do) that's an extra $14/month.
This doesn't seem like much, but that works out to an extra $168/year (that's enough to buy a new phone every year) per person. Now imagine how many people are getting these messages out of the 4.7 million messages that were sent!
Carriers really need to do this. E-mail costs the ISPs money. This costs the customers money, and if they are too inconvenienced, they will switch providers.
I disagree. The programs will be written to run natively on Linux. As to system maintenance, it is set up to require bare bones maintenance, and I have already informed them that I would continue to do so on a contract basis at very attractive pricing if/when I do leave.
As to better with WinXP and word/excel, before I took over the IT aspects of the company, the owner was litteraly getting raped in service calls on the company computers and the NT server.
The problem with Windows is that it makes administration so user intuitive, that users who have no business administering a computer are trying to add account policies, manage subdomains, set permissions, and a bunch of other things they have no business touching.
Taking myself out of the picture, it may cost more for a network technician to come in and administer Linux systems on a trip by trip basis. But when you factor in the fact that once a problem is fixed, it stays fixed, the total cost is far less than if they were all running XP.
You also have to keep the virus/worm factor in mind. What happens when the latest script kiddie creation gets spread around the system and the computers are inoperable for days at a time?
You're right about this. I work as an administrator at a small mortgage company. I've been slowly switching the computers over to Linux, but there are still a few computers running windows for necessary programs I wrote in my early programming days (VB), and these computers are still running windows 98. I haven't gotten around to rewriting the programs in Java or C++.
But not to get off the subject, when someone is having problem with their computer, they obviously complain about it. My boss hears this, and wonders why we're having so many problems. I, of course, have to listen to immediate ranting and raving of how this is probably connected to Linux, only to finally check the computer and find that the problem is a user installing spyware, adware, personal programs, deciding to "customize" their computer and breaking something, or just a general Windows inconsistency. The only problem we've had on our Linux systems in the last 12 months has been a user who couldn't figure out why her password wasn't showing up when she typed it. LOL
I agree. It's sad that children aren't being taught computers in school anymore. They are being taught Microsoft programs. I remember the good old days when computers were relatively new in school, and our courses weren't Microsoft centric. We learned actual computer usage, and to some degree, programming. Nowadays, if kids learn programming, they learn VB. If kids learn word processing, they don't learn on a variety of applications, they learn on MS Word. If they are learning spreadsheets, they learn Excel.
But it's a self perpetuating cycle. They are learning these programs because these are the programs everyone knows, and that everyone uses. What would happen if you went into a job interview and they asked if you know MS Word, and you said "No, I haven't used it in 6 years."? Even if you tried to explain you've been using Word Perfect, openoffice.org, Abiword, or any of the other word processing software, you're already at a disadvantage.
It sucks, but it's the way things are
sound a lot like the Iraqi information minister's claims that there were no troops in Bagdad.....aired right before the video of troops toppling statues of Sadam. SCO makes these loud ludicrous claims about their guaranteed success, while getting their motions struck down, and admiting in court documents that they are unable to win the motion for summary judgement without more discovery (fishing).
They own the patent on an auto-update system with a menu, and have yet another way to try and attack the various Linux distros, not to mention Apple.
This means hundreds of thousands of corporate computers will be safe from the windows update virus
Better yet, make the thing totally configurable so you can block all of the spyware inherently loaded into Windows. Not only can you lock down all incoming ports, but lock down all outgiong ports. Of course....iptables already does this. Just one more way they need 3rd party hardware/software to catch up to what Linux is already doing.
I don't think they ever intended to win. If they do, they won't be upset. But think about how long these lawsuits could drag out. We already know that Linux is becoming an increasing threat to Microsoft's Windows operating system. And we know that Microsoft has indirectly funneled cash into SCO for the purpose of litigation, so it makes sense that if SCO can keep the legalities of Linux uncertain until late 2005/early 2006, Linux will not be as much of a threat to Longhorn on either the desktop or the server. Of course, this will all end with SCO going bankrupt. But this is also assuming that their principals didn't already make millions of dollars when the stock was over $20/share. Not to mention the inflated salaries the key personel are probably paying themselves during this whole fiasco. That's what SCO (Mcbride) gets out of it.
I work at a company where telemarketing is done. We take great care to make sure DNC numbers are removed from our lists. However, our "telemarketers" use a regular phone to avoid that dead air after the customer answers. People don't realize that someone could have dialed the wrong number, or what's more likely is that the person put their number on the list in February, not realizing that the list won't be updated again until April.